My Mother Watched Her Sister Bleed to Death After an Illegal Abortion

When she was in her 30s, Mary*, now 64, learned that her mother's sister died tragically after an illegal abortion in 1930 at the age of 17. She shared her story with Cosmopolitan.com.

When I was growing up, my mother had always said her older sister died of appendicitis. But one year, right after I got married in about 1984, my mother and I were wrapping Christmas presents and I just happened to say, "Gee, I've always wondered, what was your sister like?" And then she started to tell me what had happened.

My aunt at the time was 17. They lived in [a rural town in the Midwest]. She was Catholic and she had been secretly seeing a young man who was not Catholic. She got pregnant. She hid it for a while, hoping it would go away, but then she finally told my grandfather and grandmother. My grandfather went to the young man's house to say, "They need to get married." The young man's parents said, "No, he cannot marry a Catholic." That was back in the days when Protestants didn't marry Catholics.

He came home and told my grandmother what the decision had been there. My grandmother was not ready to deal with the shame that would come in a small town with a daughter who was pregnant and not married. They lived not that far from [a nearby city], so she found out — I think it was by word-of-mouth — about a woman who would take care of it for you. My grandparents took her. They performed a back alley abortion on my aunt and they sent her home. It all went badly and when they brought her back to the town, she was still bleeding.

When they got home, my grandmother could not deal with it, so she left my mother, who at that time was 15, in the farmhouse alone with my 17-year-old aunt. My grandmother was shocked, horrified that people were going to find out that this was an abortion, and she was not the strongest of human beings, so she just exited the building. My mom was there alone and trying to help her sister and couldn't stop the bleeding and didn't know what was going on. She didn't understand what had happened. She didn't know [her sister] had an abortion. After a couple of hours, my aunt died.

When my grandparents came back home and my aunt was dead, my mother of course was in hysterics. My grandmother honestly said to my mother, "What did you do?" And my mother lived for decades with the thought that she somehow participated in the killing of her sister. She didn't understand what had happened. She eventually found out — my grandmother did tell her, but it was 25 years later.

My mom brought it up after all that time to say [to my grandmother that] she just didn't understand, and Grandma said to her, "She was pregnant and we couldn't have this happen and so this is what we did. We thought we took care of it." But then it all went wrong. My mother was able to say to herself at that point, "There was nothing I could have done."

When they came home and my aunt was dead, they called the doctor. He knew what had happened, but in a small town, he wasn't about to [have anything blamed on him] so he said, "It was just appendicitis, is what we'll call it." Buried and dead — that was it.

There's an extra part of the story that freaks me out. My mother ended up getting pregnant when she was 19 and my father was a Protestant and my grandparents probably figured, "Well, we can't kill a second daughter," so they locked my mother in her bedroom and kept her there until she was 8.5 months pregnant. Then they called my father and said, "If you want her, come and get her." He'd been coming to the house trying to figure out, "Where is she? What's going on?" My mom's parents just wanted the whole thing out of their face. They didn't want to deal with it.

So he comes to pick her up 8.5 months pregnant and she's got a suitcase, that's it. They drove to [the city] and got married the next day, and my sister was born two weeks later. They were married for 30 years until he died.

My mother told me the first part, then she told me the second part. She said, "The whole time I was in my room, I kept waiting for them to come do something to me." I think she kind of knew what was going on, but her mother didn't tell her the whole story until much later.

As she was telling me this, there were tears and she made the statement, "This scarred me for the rest of my life." She said she was crazy about her sister, so the loss of her sister was just humongous to her and it was just a really sad story of what happens when people try to undo a pregnancy in a horrific way like that.

When she and I talked about it, she made it very clear that having legalized abortion was a perfect thing. It had to happen. She said that she would imagine there were millions of women like her sister. And she felt so bad especially for her sister that she didn't even have a choice. She'd talk about people being pro-choice — there was no choice for my aunt and in the end it killed her.

*The subject chose to use a pseudonym to protect her mother's memory.

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